RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/science-article-castigates-human-su

Environmentalism is growing darkly anti-human, a misanthropy that has also seeped into science.

Vivid case in point: Science, one of the world’s most prominent scientific journals, just published an anti-human exceptionalism screed by Eileen Crist. Crist, who has a Ph.D. in sociology and not in any of the natural sciences, writes to warn that the end is nigh — and the reason for the pending catastrophe is “human supremacy.” From “Reimagining the Human:”

This worldview esteems the human as a distinguished entity that is superior to all other life forms and is entitled to use them and the places they live. The belief system of superiority and entitlement—or human supremacy—manifests in a range of anthropocentric commonplace assumptions, linguistic constructs, institutional regimes, and everyday actions of individual, group, nation-state, and corporate actors.

Crist wields the term “human supremacy” to create a mental association in the reader’s mind with the evils of racial supremacists — in much the same way that global-warming activists denigrate skeptics as “climate-change deniers” to associate them with Holocaust doubters.

Crist doesn’t just attack human exceptionalism, but also the West — which she and her publisher seem to forget is the source of so much scientific advancement:

It is crucial to recognize that human supremacy is neither culturally nor individually universal, nor is it derived in any straightforward way from human nature. However, western civilization has elaborated its most forceful, long-standing expression, and through the West’s ascendancy the influence of this worldview has spread across the globe.

And thank goodness for it. Western civilization created unprecedented liberty and general prosperity. The problem in our world is too little of “the West,” not too much.

But nihilism strikes a beat. Crist calls on us to reject “human hegemony” and embrace an “all species commonwealth:”

https://www.city-journal.org/climate-change-madness

During his time in the White House, Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other administration officials, asserted that man-made climate change was the greatest threat to humanity’s future—not just one threat among others, or a pretty big one, but the greatest. As recent Pew research makes clear, far more Americans on the political left think that climate change is a big deal than do those on the right, and since the Left is typically more secular and the Right more religious, we see a spiritual paradox: on the environment, those on the left are the true (if pagan) believers, while those on the right are the dogmatic “atheists” (the whole climate thing is just an exaggerated crisis cooked up by liberal elites and the fake media).

Conservative skepticism notwithstanding, though, climate-change ideologues have more or less shaped public debate on the issue—successfully branding their opposition as “climate deniers.” And by now, nearly 50 years after the first Earth Day, a broad-ranging and increasingly draconian ecological consciousness has become pervasive in American life, extending far beyond climate issues. Go to the supermarket, for example, or look inside your pantry. You’ll find that hundreds of items in bags and cans have certifications of “Non-GMO.” That means that they contain no genetically modified organisms. In recent years, more than 27,000 products have been so certified (by the Non-GMO Project), with the purpose of putting our minds at ease that what we’re about to eat is not genetically modified and will not sicken or kill us or make us sprout a third arm. Non-GMO fanatics and millions of consumers call these forbidden fruits “Frankenfood.” Never mind that nobody has been proved to have been harmed or killed by GMOs. (That can’t be said for organic spinach or bean sprouts.) And never mind that for 25 years, almost all corn, cotton, and soybeans grown in the United States have been genetically modified, with nobody sickened or dead or sporting an extra limb. So why the intransigence of the activists and the gullibility of so many consumers?

The issue here is not the inevitable one of managing risk and rewards in modern life. It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder whether plants genetically modified to withstand the herbicide Roundup, say, might cause more of the poison to be used and thus entail some cost or harm. The giveaway term is the reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The real issue, that is, is not primarily technical or scientific; it’s moral and spiritual. With genetic engineering, in this view, we’re trying to play God and invariably upsetting the natural order of things. Put differently, and in the terms of the radical ecologist David Graber, we’re the fallen human parasite going after holy Mother Nature.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crisis-of-good-intentions-1544486212?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Almost everywhere you turn these days, someone is claiming that capitalism is facing an existential crisis.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old who will soon be a congresswoman from New York, declares that our “no-holds-barred Wild West hypercapitalism” is on the way out. French economist Thomas Piketty, by contrast, frets about a future where we are all governed by a ruling class drawn from billionaires, what he calls “patrimonial capitalism.” Meanwhile the archbishop of Canterbury hails the gig economy as “the reincarnation of an ancient evil.”

Let us stipulate it’s foolish to pretend the market is without its costs. A 57-year-old General Motors worker in Ohio who will be laid off as his company expands production in Mexico may understandably balk at the argument that, in the larger scheme of things, it’s all for the best.

Yet the recent protests across France ought to remind us that market decisions aren’t the only ones that can make life difficult for those trying to get by on their paychecks. For in these protests are we not seeing French citizens who have lost faith in the ability of their government to fulfill its most basic tasks, along with a growing resentment of the high price inflicted on ordinary French men and women by the good intentions of their elites?

The “Yellow Vest” protests across France were triggered by an increase in the gasoline tax. But even before this planned increase, the French were already the most taxed people in the European Union, one reason they pay more than double the American average at the pump. A gallon of gas in France costs drivers roughly $6, nearly two-thirds of which is tax.

Americans spend about $2,000 a year each on gas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the U.S. price were at French levels, that would rise to at least $4,000 a year—a considerable hit for most families. To make matters worse, the French taxes have increasingly diminishing returns because France accounts for such a small fraction of global emissions.

Nor are the French the only ones with doubts about the judgment of their elites. Whatever the merits of Brexit, at its core it reflects the British people’s distrust of the proposition that a supranational government in Brussels knows best. Given how their own government has botched things, it’s hard to conceive of any ending for Brexit that doesn’t promise even less British confidence in their leaders.

The U.S. has its own versions. Until recently Exhibit A was the war America lost—the “war on poverty.” More than 50 years and trillions of dollars after Lyndon B. Johnson launched it with the best of intentions, all we have to show for it is the devastation of the black family and the dysfunctions of our inner cities.

Today, however, the crisis of good intentions is manifested most dramatically in the green movement, particularly in California. In a recent article for the Orange County Register, Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky write that “California is creating a feudalized society characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middle class and a large, rising segment of the population that is in or near poverty.”CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/seldom-seen-lately/

Tony Thomas, fresh from eye surgery, writes:

I was waiting around at Sunbury Day Hospital, north of Melbourne, last week for an eye-cataract job. I reached for a Reader’s Digest half-buried among the Hello and Take 5 pile of magazines. The Digest’s cover lines included “Politicians’ Outrageous Perks: This privileged class is living the high life – on our money.” Good job, Reader’s Digest.

But hang on, look at the item immediately below on the Contents page: What’s wrong with global warming? The last time Earth had a warm-up, good things happened.

I flicked to page 45. It’s a piece by Dennis Avery, a veteran US food scientist. There’s an illustration of a yellow blossom in a sort of rain-forest, with the caption, “Robust forests – A warmer world could create plant heaven.”

Dr Avery discusses how the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) helped agriculture and civilisation to thrive, and ridicules the claims about warming costing economies trillions of dollars this century. Here’s how he concludes his three-page essay:

“History and the science of climatology indicate that we have nothing to fear but fearmongers themselves. Any global warming in the 21st Century should be modest, bringing back one of the most pleasant and productive environments humans – and wildlife — have ever enjoyed.”

Who is this author Avery? Aged 82, he’s been a food policy analyst with the US Department of Agriculture and Department of State. He’s now director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, where he edits Global Food Quarterly.

I flopped back in bemusement. I had no idea Reader’s Digest is spearheading the sceptic cause. I thought it had long been captured, like Time and The Economist, by the junk scientists and their media shills. Holy (greenhouse-gas emitting) cow! the Digest still has a global circulation of 10 million with maybe 50 million readers. It remains the world’s largest paid-circulation magazine.

I suspected the warming-is-good piece was the sceptic Digest’s sly attempt to undermine the UN’s COP 24 at Katowice. There was no counterpiece that “warming is bad” or “Avery is in the pay of fossil fuel interests”. Avery’s piece is presented as an orthodox view, needing no rebuttal from fringe groups like the IPCC or our own Climate Council.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/greenies_take_a_beating_on_fossil_fuel_divestment_at_harvard.html

Is the green fraud finally dead? Probably not, but when you’ve got Harvard students rejecting a free-and-easy-to-sign petition for university divestment from fossil fuels – in droves – you know someone’s wising up. Maybe this is the start of something.

Here’s what the Washington Examiner reported:

In response to recent doomsday predictions by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a number of Harvard students decided to take matters into their own hands by calling on the administration to completely divest all financial holdings in industries associated with fossil fuels. According to the petition, Harvard has an obligation to divest its funds due to its significant role in the “global economy.”

…and…

Despite their efforts, a measly 166 individuals have signed on to their Change.org petition, which accounts for roughly 0.36 percent of the school’s 40,818 students and faculty. According to journalists for Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, administrators have “flatly rejected” the idea of immediate divestment.

Based on what’s seen at the petition itself, it’s been up at least seven days, and only managed to get 100 signatures in the first seven, and 91 now. Can you say ‘pathetic’?

Maybe that’s because Harvard students read the news as kids and learned all about how fraudy and corruption-prone ‘green’ energy is, as evidenced by Solyndra. Green energy is fraud energy, simple enough to understand. Or maybe the brighter ones know for a fact that ‘green’ energy relies on coal-fired plants to create all those electrical power-charging stations, could it be that? Maybe the kids are just sick of this divest-everything blather, which has been going on since the 1980s. Or maybe the kids are noticing what happens when greens rule the roost in cities like Paris.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/28/why-the-supreme-courts-2007-decision-labeling-carb/

I have always been reluctant to make any predictions, “especially about the future;” however, I want to make two exceptions.

I predict that the global warming pause of the last 40 years (“hiatus”), the growing “gap” between models and observed temperatures will continue to grow to the year 2100, and likely, beyond.

I also predict that increases in global Sea Level Rise (SLR) will reach about 6 inches by 2100, and contrary to the U.N-Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-2013), I expect there will be no discernible acceleration in this rate of rise.

During the only sure climate warming, 1910-40, the Sea Level Rise increased steadily at 1-2mm/year, as measured by most tidal gauges, with respect to their local shorelines, which did not have enough time to rise or fall.

But we know that water expands when heated. However, the Sea Level Rise did not accelerate during 1910-40.

Something must be offsetting that expansion, which increases rapidly. I believe the offset comes from evaporation, into the atmosphere, with subsequent precipitation turning into ice over the Antarctic. (The area-ratio oceans/Antarctic is 58.)

Following 1910-40, the climate cooled during 1945-75, according to our best data. Again, SLR does not react, but continues to rise at the same steady rate.

This lack of Sea Level Rise acceleration proves that ocean temperature change does not affect SLR — and neither does the steady increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) — contrary to what former Vice President Al Gore and James Hansen, a retired NASA scientist, say. It means that human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, has negligible influence on Sea Level Rise.